My view would be that even if it was not a requirement to enforce accessibility a party which will not do so must bear the tag of being a person or organization which discriminates against people with disabilities. As far as I have seen from browsing a variety of US sites Educational sites need to be accessible but I will leave that to the lawyers.
In Australia, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, which administrates our disabilities act has clearly expressed the view that web sites...and all information on the INTERNET has to be accessible. It has indicated that accessibility is the requirement and the WAI guidelines must be met or exceeded. In the case of Intranets I would hope that they would apply the same standards as if people cannot access the material they are being discriminated against.
If anyone is interested a set of lecture notes that I used when I gave a couple of lectures at Uni and at the WA ACS E-Commerce SIG are available at http://www.geocities.com/murdochau/index.html. If anyone has any suggestions on how these may be improved please let me know.
Harry Woodrow
harrry@email.com .(...note 3 r's)
- -----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Denise Wood
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2001 9:42 AM
To: 'mburks952@worldnet.att.net'; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: Section 508
Absolutely Mike
Asif, I too work at a state university - but in Australia. We are technically not covered by Section 508 which is of course a federal initiative of the US - an amendment of the Rehabilitation Act made by Congress in 1998.
However, we have parallel legislation to the ADA. The Australian legislation is known as the Disability Discrimination Act and this was passed by the Commonwealth government in 1992. As with the American legislation, the DDA states that it is illegal to
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